


safe in your arms

by lostinwander (flusteredkeith)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Another Nightmare Fic, Canon Universe, Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, SHEITH - Freeform, Sleepwalking, Sleepy Cuddles, featuring sleepwalking, in which keith is a light sleeper, just soft things, soft fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-09
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-09 11:36:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11668338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flusteredkeith/pseuds/lostinwander
Summary: “I’m sorry,” Shiro says.“Don’t worry about it,” Keith mumbles, his voice muffled against Shiro’s shirt. “I know you would never hurt me on purpose.”





	safe in your arms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ErinNovelist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErinNovelist/gifts).



> Happy birthday to my dear friend [ErinNovelist](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ErinNovelist/pseuds/ErinNovelist)! As your [Miraculous Ladybug Sleepwalking fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9071104) was such a hit, I thought it'd be cute to bless you with more sleepwalking fics. You're such a sunshine child who always brightens my day and I hope to have more Sheith dates on Google hangout as the years go by. <3

As someone who’s been known all his life for sleeping with a dagger under his pillow, Keith is never one to drop his defenses, not even when he’s asleep. So when he hears the quiet footsteps of someone passing by his room, his ears perk up at once and his eyes creak open.

It takes him a while at first, his mind swaying back and forth between the thin layer of consciousness and unconsciousness, and a small part of his brain (the sleepiest part of it) tells him he’s imagining it. But then, as he slowly resurfaces from slumber, the footsteps continue on. Slow gentle strides of someone who sounds suspiciously tall and…

His eyes snap open. He knows there’s no mistaking it now.

Takashi Shirogane is wandering around out of bed.

Rubbing his eyes, Keith pushes himself up into a seated position and blinks a few times as he comes to. Once his brain refocuses itself, only one thought sharpens in his mind.

_Shiro._

He doesn’t exactly know why Shiro would be walking around at this hour, but given the black paladin’s history during his missing year, Keith has a vague idea.

Keith throws the blankets off of himself and swings his legs around so he can get out of bed. He makes it no further than three steps when he hears a loud squeak as his foot catches on something. Flailing his arms, he topples over and lands face first onto the floor.

For one wild moment, dread fills him at the idea that maybe he’s stepped on one of the mice. Looking down at the floor, however, he sees that it’s none other than one of Lance’s rubber duckies.

Keith rolls his eyes. It’s not the first time Lance has played this prank on him. Usually, Keith is wary enough to see it coming, but tonight in his haste to check up on Shiro, it had totally slipped his mind.

He curses Lance internally and chucks the bath toy into the trash bin where it belongs and pulls on his pants. Within seconds, he’s fully dressed and heading out the door, which hisses as it slides shut behind him.

Once he’s outside of his room, he looks up and down their sleeping quarters.

“Shiro?”

He knows he wasn’t imagining it when he heard those footsteps, yet no response calls back to him even though Keith is sure Shiro couldn’t have gone very far. Eyebrows furrowing, he tries again.

“Shiro?”

His own voice echoes back to him. No sound or hint of Shiro’s deep timber taking the shape of Keith’s name.

Keith heads over to Shiro’s door and punches the press pad for it to open. Just as he had expected, Shiro’s bed is empty, his blankets and sheets looking sad and forlorn.

Frowning, Keith walks out of their sleeping corridor and into the main hallway where he looks back and forth in both directions.

There’s no sign of Shiro. Instead, the blank castle walls seem to stretch for an eternity, empty, hollow and devoid of life.

Keith tries to remember which way the receding footsteps had tapped down but given the distance between the hallway and his bedroom, he figures it’s a moot point. With a sigh, he decides it wouldn't make much of a difference in the long run. Stepping out into the hallway, he heads down to the right along the cool passageway.

“Shiro?”

Keith continues to call his name down each hall he passes through. If Shiro is up for any reason remotely similar to the last time Keith had discovered him awake at this late hour, then Keith knows he has every cause for concern.

“Shiro? Are you there?”

He remembers hearing Shiro’s panicked yells in the middle of the night a few weeks ago. As his room is only a few doors away, the faint, muffled sound of Shiro’s moans had traveled through to his ears.

Eyes snapping open, Keith had thrown his blankets off at once and bounded out of bed.

_When he bursts into Shiro’s room, he finds the black paladin curled up and twitching in his sleep. Keith barely registers the dread that fills his own stomach as he rushes forward and catches Shiro by the shoulders._

_“Shiro!” he yells, shaking him. “Shiro, wake up!”_

_Legs kicking and eyelids shut, Shiro begins writhing in bed, low whimpers escaping his lips._

_“Hey, hey, hey,” Keith tries again, gripping Shiro’s shoulders harder. “Wake up, wake up. It’s me.”_

_With a violent jolt, Shiro’s eyes snap open and he sits up at once, nearly smacking Keith in the face with his prosthetic arm._

_“No! I’m not—! I’m not what you — I’m…”_

_He’s panting as though he’d been running for miles. As he catches his breath, he turns his head towards Keith, the ghost of a nightmare still etched into his features._

_“Hey, you’re okay,” Keith croons, his thumb rubbing circles around Shiro’s shoulder. “It’s me. I’m here.”_

_Keith watches the terror fade from Shiro’s face, his furrowed eyebrows smoothening out as he continues to look at Keith._

_“You okay?” Keith asks. He wants to hold Shiro close, to cradle his head into his chest and tell him he’d be safe there. But he isn’t entirely sure if Shiro would want that._

_For a moment though, Shiro looks as though he’s considering the same thing. In the next second, however, he drops his gaze down to his knees and wipes a brow of sweat from his forehead._

_“Yeah. I’ll be fine,” he finally says._

Keith had ended up staying up with him for the rest of that night. Together they sat in the castle lounge with water pouches in their hands, simply passing the time and being in each other’s presence. Keith hadn’t dared to push any of his boundaries — not if Shiro didn’t ask. So they stayed up and talked about everything and anything from the galaxy to the sun, to the stars, to the Earth, so long as the topic was weightless and light. After all, there’s enough gravity on their hearts to hold them down and Keith knows they’d both prefer to fly.

As the ticks go by, Keith continues to wander around the castle, scanning every corner for possible signs that Shiro might’ve passed through. He checks the dining hall, the bathrooms, the kitchens, and the hangars. Keith keeps hoping with every room he passes that he’ll simply catch Shiro doing something mundane and untroubling, perhaps eating a midnight snack or hanging out with his lion.

However, wherever Shiro has wandered off to, Keith hasn’t found him doing any of these things. The growing dread gnaws at the insides of his stomach as he makes his way around one of the final hallways he hasn’t walked through yet. The castle is huge, but only so big. Unless Shiro found his way outside of it — which would be an even bigger cause for concern — Keith is quite surprised that he hasn’t seen him yet.

 _And maybe if Lance hadn’t set that stupid duck up, I would’ve found Shiro by now_ , he thinks with gritted teeth. Shiro had only just passed his doorway when he’d tripped over the damned thing.

His mind proceeds to flit through a barrage of curse words, all dedicated to the blue paladin, when he hears it.

The clanging of metal upon metal, shallow grunts and raspy breaths — the sounds of a struggle. It’s faint and distant, but the second Keith hears it, he knows there’s no mistaking it.

“Shiro!” he calls out, breaking off into a run.

Keith sprints along the dark hallway, following the source of the noise. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that they’re coming from the training room. Heart pounding louder in his ears, he quickens his pace, worried about what he might find.

The second he reaches the entrance of the training deck, he punches the touch pad and rushes in before the doors can fully slide open.

The color drains from his face at the scene before him. There in the center of the training room kneels Shiro, crouched down and paralyzed at the gladiator bot’s feet. His Galra arm is active and glowing but his eyes remain closed and twitching.

Keith doesn’t stop to think. Pushing off, he runs as fast as he can towards the center of the room as the gladiator raises its bo staff to attack.

With a loud thump, Keith catches it by its torso and knocks it off its feet. The both of them go careening off to the side, crashing and bouncing off the floors until Keith pins the bot to the ground.

“End training sequence!” Keith yells at it.

The round cyan light on its face blinks twice before it dies out and deactivates. Keith sighs in relief and wipes his forehead, but before he can turn to check up on Shiro, something clops him over the head, sending him toppling over onto his side.

With a short grunt of pain, Keith shakes his head and looks up to see Shiro standing over him, still asleep, posed for combat.

“Shiro, wake up!” he shouts as the black paladin raises his weaponized arm and walks toward him. “It’s me!”

Shiro’s face twitches again but he remains asleep. Keith backs up as the older man takes another step forward.

“Damn it,” Keith mutters to himself as Shiro swings his arm. Grabbing the bot’s bo staff from the floor, Keith whips around to block the oncoming hit. With a loud clang, Shiro’s wrist comes down on it hard, pushing against Keith’s hold with a strength quite remarkable for a sleeping man. In any other situation where his best friend _wasn’t_ trying to kill him, he’d have felt impressed.

“Shiro! Wake up!” he tries again. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

Raising his arm, Shiro relents for a split second before bringing it down again. Keith rolls out of the way at once, kicking himself up onto his feet as he does so and holding the bo staff out in front of him in defense.

He’s sparred with Shiro more times than he can count back in their Garrison days, but he’s never gone up against his Galra arm. It’s a force to be reckoned with — he’s seen what it’s done to robot sentries, how it’s melted through tables and walls, how it barely singes Keith’s hair now as he leans back to avoid a close sweep over his head. Whatever Shiro’s hallucinating, Keith decides it must be scary. He can’t even imagine the horrors that plague Shiro’s nightmares these days let alone the one that’s haunting him tonight. All he knows is that Shiro needs to wake up _now_.

“Shiro!” Keith yells in between blocking his blows. “Wake — up!”

He’s strictly on defense, moving only to dodge or deflect Shiro’s attacks. Shiro has chased him all along the walls of the training deck but Keith still can’t figure out how to wake him up.

Looking around at the wide, empty room, he tries to think of ideas.

“Activate — water?!” he tries on a whim. A swarm of drones fly out of the vents that open up in the ceiling. “What? No, no! Deactivate!”

It’s a mess. Keith ducks as another strike comes swinging his way. Shiro’s arm knocks over a drone behind him instead as Keith twists away from the black paladin, panicking. He didn’t mean to make it worse for Shiro.

“Deactivate drones!” he shouts wildly. The round, metal robots fly away from them, returning towards the spot in the ceiling they came from, but in the split second Keith had looked up at the retreating drones, Shiro’s wrist comes out of nowhere and knocks the bo staff out of his hands.

Keith staggers backwards from the force of the hit and straightens back up. His face pales as he sees Shiro charging towards him. Without sparing another thought, Keith lunges forward as well, ducking low and catching Shiro by the waist, sending them both flying backwards and onto the floor.

Typically, Keith pins Shiro down more often than Shiro likes to admit. This time, it’s Shiro who pins Keith to the ground, his Galra arm raised above their heads and and his human hand wrapped around Keith’s neck.

“Shiro, it’s me,” Keith says again, this time in a much more subdued voice. Although Shiro’s managed to fight with full strength during his sleep, Keith can tell that the fingers around his neck are already starting to loosen its grip.

Noticing a mild wetness at the corner of Shiro’s eyes, Keith reaches up to stroke the side of Shiro’s face. With a gentleness he’s only ever reserved for Shiro, Keith then trails his thumb up to Shiro’s forehead and smoothens out the knot in his eyebrows.

Shiro’s features twitch for a moment before his eyes finally crack open with a sharp intake of breath.

“Wh-what? Where am I?”

Keith watches as the confused paladin slowly adjusts to his surroundings, catching his breath and lowering his Galra arm down to his side. Keith’s hand covers over the one Shiro has around his neck and squeezes it reassuringly.

“It’s okay,” he says. “We’re in the training room. In the castle. You’re safe.”

“Keith?” Shiro asks, his voice hoarse. The look of terror hasn’t completely left his face yet. He leans back just enough to allow Keith to sit up. Keith doesn’t let go of his hand.

“You’re okay,” Keith repeats, bringing the back of Shiro’s hand to his cheek. He stares up at the older man as Keith leans into the touch. “We’re in the castle and I’m here. You’re safe.”

Shiro looks around the room, taking in everything from the inactive gladiator bot to the discarded bo staff to the half-dead drone crackling on the floor.

“Did I… Did I just—?” he looks at Keith, who’s clearly worked up a sweat, and his eyes land on the bruise on Keith’s cheekbone. “Did I hurt you?”

Shiro reaches his Galra hand out to hold Keith’s face. Without flinching, Keith lets him.

“It’s nothing,” Keith tells him. “I’m more worried about you. Are you—”

But tightening his grip on Keith’s hand, Shiro pulls the younger man to his chest, wrapping his prosthetic arm around Keith’s back.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says.

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith mumbles, his voice muffled against Shiro’s shirt. “I know you would never hurt me on purpose.”

Shiro squeezes him tighter, his hand cradling the back of Keith’s skull. Cheeks pressed against Shiro’s chest, Keith breathes in, taking in the faint scent of aftershave and that all too familiar skin-smell around Shiro’s neck.

They stay like this for a few minutes in the center of the training room. Keith can hear the pounding of Shiro’s heart start to slow and knows it’s only a matter of time before this moment will end.

“Thanks for waking me up,” Shiro murmurs. “The nightmares haven’t been that bad for a while.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Keith asks, head still buried in his chest. He can feel the gentle rumble of Shiro’s exhausted sigh.

“I don’t think I could explain it,” he replies. “I’m sorry for troubling you though.”

“Don’t be,” Keith says. “It isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Neither did you.”

Keith pulls away and lifts his head up to look Shiro in the eye.

“I asked for every bit of this when I became your friend,” he says, a harsh note in his voice. “I don’t care what happens to me. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”

“Keith…”

“And if you don’t like it,” Keith continues. “Then you should’ve thought of that before you came in and changed my life.”

Shiro stares at him with his mouth slightly parted in surprise. For a tick, Keith wonders if he’s pushed his boundaries a bit too far. It’s not unusual for Keith to make such admissions but when he remembers that Shiro might still be in a raw, vulnerable state after his nightmare, Keith wants more than anything to be careful with him.

After a few blinks, Shiro’s lips curve up into a small smile. Keeping his hand at the back of Keith’s neck, he pulls Keith in and leans his forehead against his.

“Thanks, Keith,” he says. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

 _Me neither_ , Keith thinks as he closes his eyes. He hears a light chuckle from Shiro and his heart skips a beat. It’s clear Shiro knows Keith shares the same sentiment.

“Are you feeling better?” Keith asks, blinking up at him.

“Of course,” he replies, his voice deep and gravelly. “I’m with you.”

Keith smiles, feeling a sense of calm wash over him. Even if it doesn’t mean what he hopes it to mean, he clutches Shiro’s words close to his chest.

Shiro takes a breath and lets out a long exhale. “Should we go back to the sleeping quarters?”

“Yeah,” Keith agrees.

Keith pushes himself to his feet, pulling Shiro up with him. They walk side by side out of the training hall and back down the hallway towards their rooms.

As Shiro’s bedroom is located at the furthest end of the corridor, Keith’s room comes first. They stop in front of his door, Shiro idling by as Keith raises an arm to press the touch pad.

“Well. Thanks again,” Shiro says, rubbing the back of his neck. “And I’m sorry for disturbing your sleep.”

Keith pauses with his hand in midair and turns to look at him.

“Anytime,” he smiles. “I’ll see you at breakfast?”

“Yeah…” Shiro says. “Goodnight, then?”

“Yeah. Goodnight.”

Keith punches the touch pad and the door slides open with a hiss. He’s about to take a step forward when Shiro’s voice calls out to him again.

“Keith?”

Keith turns to face him, his heart beating fast. “Yeah?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” Shiro continues, avoiding his gaze. “Could you maybe stay over in my room tonight?”

The door to his room slides shut once again from the lack of activity. With a small smile, Keith nods.

“Of course,” he says. “Whatever you need.”

He follows Shiro down the hallway to his room. The door slides open, revealing Shiro’s empty bed just as he left it. It feels natural, Keith reflects, as Shiro settles himself on his side of the mattress while Keith sits on the other. There’s nothing strange or foreign about climbing into bed together, as though it’s a typical thing they do everyday.

Shiro rests his head on his pillow and lifts the covers to allow Keith to wiggle under it.

“Are you comfortable?” Shiro asks as Keith lies down, facing him.

“Yeah,” he replies as he adjusts his pillow.

It’s by no means the first time they’ve slept side by side in the same space but it is the first since Shiro left for Kerberos more than a year ago. After everything they’ve been through up until now, both together and individually, Keith feels something different about tonight. There’s ease and familiarity, but also a shift from how things used to be.

Before, Keith wouldn’t have thought twice about their set up before falling asleep. Now, his heart pounds loudly in his ears, giving no sign of slowing down anytime soon. During much simpler times, Shiro often drifted off much more easily, a look of peace on his face. Now, however, there’s a world of sadness in his eyes as he stares back at Keith. A distant, haunting look hewn into his face.

Keith resents all the terrible things that made Shiro this way, but also accepts it. Not only has it become a part of Shiro, it’s molded and solidified with everything Shiro was and has transformed him into everything he is now. He’s still a leader. He’s _their_ leader. And still the kindest, gentlest person Keith’s ever known.

“You gonna be alright to sleep?” Keith asks. He’s starting to feel himself doze off but he refuses to fall asleep until he’s sure Shiro can, too.

Shiro reaches out his human hand to cup the back of Keith’s head, thumb grazing over the bruise on his cheekbone. With a gentle pull, he draws Keith in and presses his lips to the discolored mark. Then, wrapping both arms around Keith, Shiro holds him close and tucks Keith’s head beneath his chin.

“Now I am,” Shiro says.

Keith snakes his arm around Shiro’s torso and buries his nose in the older man’s chest.

“Good,” he says. “That’s all that matters.”

He waits for Shiro’s breathing to level out into slow, measured breaths. Then, with a smile, Keith closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello to me on tumblr [@flusteredkeith](https://flusteredkeith.tumblr.com)!
> 
> If you liked this work, check out some of my other recent works!
> 
> [come morning light](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11740683): a very short little soft, Sheith drabble I wrote to soothe my S3 wounds. I have to say it worked for me. I hope it'll work for you too~
> 
> [tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11677323): Sheith, multichapter, Edge of Tomorrow AU (aka military sci-fi meets groundhog's day) - written for the Voltron Big Bang.
> 
> [the temperature's rising](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11422848): a short Sheith oneshot where Shiro and Keith get locked up in a closet after losing a drinking game.
> 
> [once in a sunset](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11458449): a Plance oneshot where Lance comforts Pidge.
> 
> [shop til your heart drops](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10943253): Kallura fic where Allura takes Keith to the mall in attempts to try and figure out what he wants for his birthday. Shenanigans and feelings ensue.


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